A site for discussing the benefits and challenges of using grass to produce energy in the Northeastern U.S.

Movie, full-scale production and marketing

First off, please check out our new video here, if you have not seen it yet.

As many of you are aware, Hudson Valley Grass Energy has developed a mobile, large-scale grass pelleting mill. It has been years of research and development but we are finally seeing consistent production of around one ton per hour. Recently we have added automated fines recycling from our cyclone and shaker. We’ve also purchased a simple bedding chopper to pre-process small square bales in an easy and efficient way. For our most recent productions we fed the mill directly out of a forage wagon, removing the need to bale altogether- saving the producers a lot in costs going in. Ultimately we’re hoping to reach 1.5-2 tons per hours with our next (and hopefully final) phase of modifications: increasing our pre-processing and steam capacity.

Ok, so we have a working mill and plenty of low quality hay and marginal lands in the Hudson Valley but what we don’t have is the market. There are a handful of “early innovators” here and there but we all know that a much bigger push is needed from manufacturers and policy makers. In Orange County we are working with town of Warwick to transition their school, garage and bus building to local grass pellet heat. We are on a path to get a couple of big users and a few residential consumers to satisfy the capacity of this one mill. In future full-scale production we will be making 2,000 to 3,000 tons per year, which represents around 1,000 homes. If the users are there, the producers will be far more willing to participate.

HVGE could use a HVAC specialist to assess, recommend, install and maintain grass pellet stoves and furnaces in the area. Perhaps this person could also help to get manufacturers on board by demonstrating the demand for grass-compatible units. If there are any other groups in the near area, perhaps we could join together to make this happen in order to develop this market locally, near-term. If you’re interested or have any ideas, email us at contact@hvge.org